ARTICLE: GM Apples That Don’t Brown to Reach U.S. Shelves This Fall

The following is an excerpt of an article in the MIT Technology Review about the launch of a new non-browning genetically modified apple. 

The modified Golden Delicious apples were developed by Okanagan Specialty Fruits, a privately owned company acquired for $41 million in 2015 by the Maryland biotech Intrexon. Other divisions of that company are already marketing genetically modified salmon, cloned cattle, and self-destructing mosquitoes.

The company plans to sell the apples as bags of pre-sliced fruit but say they will not be labeled as “produced with genetic engineering” and will not come with any other packaging identifying them as GMOs. Instead, as allowed under a 2016 labeling law, there will be a QR code that links to a Web page with detailed information on how the apples were made.

“We didn’t want put ‘GMO’ and a skull and crossbones on the package,” Neal Carter, Okanagan’s founder, said this week, during a presentation in San Francisco.

A package of golden delicious apple slices. The fruit has been genetically modified so they don't turn brown.

The GM apple is notable partly because Carter, an apple grower and farming innovator, independently developed it and won regulatory approval to sell it. Most GMOs have been developed and marketed as seeds by large corporations like Monsanto or DuPont and involve large-acre crops like soybeans and corn.

Using a technique called gene silencing, Carter and his research team engineered the apple’s DNA to produce less polyphenol oxidase, or PPO, the enzyme that causes the flesh to turn brown. Carter says slices of the engineered apples can stay free of browning as long as three weeks.

To read the entire article, please visit the MIT Technology Review website.